1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a system and method for detecting and analyzing movement patterns of people or objects in a queue. In particular, the present invention is able to detect and record the number of people in the queue, the length of time the people have been waiting in the queue, as well as other characteristics of the queue. In one embodiment, the present invention may be utilized in a retail store environment to track customer activity.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In retail establishments, such as grocery stores, department stores, and the like, customer satisfaction is of paramount importance. Satisfied customers become repeat customers, and unhappy customers may become former customers. It has become common for retailers to use various techniques to gauge customer satisfaction. For example, a customer satisfaction index may consist of a customer's perception of price, product availability, friendly service, checkout efficiency, and other attributes. It has been suggested that there is a direct correlation between such an index and sales revenue.
As noted above, checkout efficiency is a common measurement of customer satisfaction. That is, a customer's satisfaction is directly related to, among other factors, the amount of time the customer waits in a queue (line) in order to purchase the goods. For example, an average service time can be used to measure the amount of time spent by customers waiting to exit the store.
Many retailers currently manage staffing based on transaction frequency and cashier/checker productivity. It is common for retailers to continually try to determine the number of checkout lanes required in their stores. By analyzing the total number of customers waiting to check out, it is possible to do better estimates of the number of checkout lanes required. Also, more accurate labor scheduling can be performed, since a historical analysis of peak checkout periods can be based on the number of customers waiting to be served, rather than transaction frequency. This allows the retailer to optimize store operations.
Unfortunately, no efficient way currently exists for a retailer, or anybody else, to effectively and continually determine characteristics of a queue in real-time. While it is possible for the retailer to assign the responsibility of monitoring the queue(s) to a dedicated employee, or even to the cashiers themselves, these manual methods prove to be cost prohibitive or at least quite unreliable. The cost associated with a dedicated person, and the difficulty of keeping accurate statistics by hand, cause a manual approach to analyzing queues to be wholly unsatisfactory.
There is therefore a significant need in the art for an efficient and automated system and method for analyzing various characteristics of a queue of people, or any other items that may form in a line.